An aircraft carrier is a noble thing. It lacks almost everything that seems to denote nobility, yet deep nobility is there. A carrier has no poise. It has no grace. It is top-heavy and lop-sided. It has the lines of a well-fed cow. It doesn’t cut through the water like a cruiser, knifing romantically along. It doesn’t dance and cavort like a destroyer. It just plows. You feel it should be carrying a hod, rather than wearing a red sash. Yet a carrier is a ferocious thing, and out of its heritage of action has grown nobility. I believe that today every navy in the world has as its number one priority the destruction of enemy carriers. That’s a precarious honor, but it’s a proud one.
—Ernie Pyle, war correspondent, World War II
The first aircraft carriers made their appearance in the early years of World War One. These first flattops were improvised affairs built on hulls that had been laid down with other purposes in mind, and it was not until the 1920s that the first purpose-built carriers were launched, but no one was as yet clear about the role of the carriers and they were largely unloved by the “battleship admirals” who still believed that their great dreadnoughts were the ultimate capital ships.
The centenary of naval aviation was celebrated in 2011 in remembrance of the pioneering efforts and sacrifices of people like Eugene Ely, an exhibition pilot for aircraft designer and builder Glenn Curtiss. Ely had worked as a chauffeur and then as a salesman for Portland, Oregon auto dealer Harry Wemme who had purchased a Curtiss biplane and then become an agent for Curtiss products. Wemme, however, was afraid to fly and Ely offered to try and fly the plane for him. He crashed the plane and, embarrassed by the accident, bought the wreck from Wemme, repaired it and within a month taught himself to fly. He bagan making appearances at various air meets and at one such event in Minneapolis, he met Glenn Curtiss and some of his associates. Ely also happened to meet Captain Washington Chambers, USN, who had been appointed by Secretary of the Navy George Meyer to investigate military uses for aviation within the Navy. The meeting led to experiments by Ely with a Curtiss Pusher aircraft. He made the world’s first reasonably successful take-off in a fixed-wing plane from the deck of a ship. In November 1910, he flew a Curtiss Pusher down a gently sloping wooden platform on the forecastle of the light cruiser USS Birmingham as the ship steamed slowly in Hampton Roads, Chesapeake Bay, Virginia, In the brief flight, Ely’s plane actually touched the water when it plunged downward after clearing the eighty-three-foot platform runway, but he managed to retain control and landed safely on the shore at Willoughby Spit, rather than circling the harbour and landing at the Norfolk Navy Yard as planned. On the following January 11th, Ely, wearing a padded football helmet and a bicycle tube as a survival vest, took off from the site of what became the Tanforan race track in San Bruno, California, his aircraft equipped with a system of grappling hooks fitted underneath the airfoil that caught arresting wires attached to sandbags. The system was devised and built by circus performer and aviator Hugh Robinson, and Ely successfully landed the Curtiss Pusher at forty mph aboard a platform on the USS Pennsylvania then anchored in San Francisco Bay. When interviewed after the feat, Ely told a news reporter: “It was easy enough. I think the trick could be successfully turned nine times out of ten.” Ely continued flying exhibitions for Curtiss and when asked by a reporter for the Des Moines Register if he had any plans for retiring, he replied: “I guess I will be like the rest of them, keep at it until I am killed.” In October 1911, just before what would have been his twenty-fifth birthday, Eugene Ely was killed in the crash of an aircraft he was displaying at Macon, Georgia. In 1933, the U.S. Congress awarded Ely a posthumous Distinguished Flying Cross “for extraordinary achievement as a pioneer civilian aviator and for his significant contribution to the development of aviation in the United States Navy.”
above: HMS Eagle; below: HMS Argus
top: HMS Courageous at sea; centre: HMS Ark Royal; above: HMS Courageous which was initially a cruiser and then rebuilt as an aircraft carrier in the mid-1920s.
Britain, for her part, counts 2009 as the centenary year of naval aviation, as it was in 1909 that the Admiralty designated the then grand sum of £35,000 toward development of an airship and the process that began the formation of the Fleet Air Arm. The nation chose to celebrate the anniversary year with a programme of events and publications commemorating the centenary and showcasing the endurance, flexibility, and the potency of naval aviation.
In December 1910, Glenn Curtiss offered—at his own expense—to “instruct an officer of the United States Navy in the operation and construction of a Curtiss aeroplane, and on 23 December Lieutenant T. G. Ellyson reported for instruction at North Island, San Diego Bay. Four months later he was graduated by Curtiss who wrote to the Secretary of the Navy: “Lt. Ellyson is now competent to care for and operate Curtiss aeroplanes.” Ellyson became America’s first naval aviator. In Great Britain, Commander Charles R. Samson, RN, achieved the first fixed-wing aircraft take-off from a moving warship on 9 May 1912 when his Short S.38 rose from the battleship HMS Hibernia while she was steaming at seventeen mph during the Royal Fleet Review at Weymouth.
The brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright had made their initial powered flight at Kitty Hawk on the coast of North Carolina in December 1903, and less than eight years later men were demonstrating the ability to take off from and, with the aid of arresting wires, recover an aircraft to a “carrier deck” of a ship. That ability, tied to the value and significance of aviation for reconnaissance and patrol purposes, pursuaded the U. S. Navy that aircraft carriers or “floating airports” must be designed, developed and acquired in order to exploit and support its combat aeroplanes. The British, though, were at the forefront of such development and, by 1913, had identified and defined virtually all of the most fundamental needs of carrier operation, aircraft and equipment. Their HMS Ark Royal, laid down initially as a merchant ship and then converted in her building stocks to a hybrid aeroplane/seaplane carrier with a launch platform, was arguably the first modern aircraft carrier. Ark Royal served in the Dardanellles campaign and through the First World War.
The British led the navies of the world in bomb-dropping, gun mounting and firing, and the development and successful launching of a fourteen-inch torpedo, as well as wing-folding for the improved stowage of bulky aircraft in the limited space of a ship deck. The British had soon decided that it was essential to develop the purpose-built aircraft carrier, something they achieved by the end of the First World War. The Royal Navy and the navies of France, Japan, and the United States were then hard at the task of converting existing vessels to become aircraft carriers. The Americans followed the British lead, in converting the collier Jupiter into an experimental aircraft carrier they recommissioned as the USS Langley in March 1922. The Japanese commissioned their first aircraft carrier that December, the Hosho, a relatively small ship of only 7,470 tons displacement, but capable of storing and operating up to twenty-six aircraft. This remarkable achievement was all the more impressive for her pioneering installation of an experimental light and mirror landing approach system. An historical irony about Hosho is that, of the ten aircraft carriers with which the Imperial Japanese fought the Second World War, only Hosho survived that conflict.
above: Built for the Royal Navy during the First World War, HMS Furious was largely a work in progress paving the way for the next British aircraft carriers; below: HMS Glorious was originally a Courageous class battlecruiser, rebuilt as an aircraft carrier in the 1920s. After supporting British operations in Norway during April 1940, she was sunk by the German battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau two months later.
In the course of these developments, there were a number of incidents—teething pains—that had to be endured for progress to be achieved. One such involved the Royal Navy pilot, Squadron-Commander E.H. Dunning who was serving aboard HMS Furious in the summer of 1917. Furiouswas quite fast for her time, and Dunning believed that the speed of the ship would be a primary factor in the development of a routinely safe landing procedure for his pilots. His squadron was flying the agile Sopwith Pup biplane which Dunning thought of as “easily and gently coaxed over the flight deck of the ship to a safe and acceptable landing.” Furious was not equipped with arrestor wires, but Dunning decided to have rope handles fitted to his aircraft. He told the deck hands to grip the handles once he had landed, and hold the little Pup firmly on the flight deck. On 2 August 1917, he approached Furious and made the first successful carrier deck landing on a ship that was steaming into the wind. But, in another landing attempt two days later, one of the tyres of his aircraft burst as he touched down on the deck. The Sopwith cartwheeled and plummeted off the edge into the sea before the deck hands could restrain it. Dunning drowned in the accident, but it was a factor in leading to the Royal Navy accepting that a much larger hull was needed to provide a far greater deck area, one similar in size to that of a conventional airfield. The safety of its pilots and aircrew required such a change.
The problem of how to plan this new kind of warship, of how to break up its useful space and position its essential structures, the bridge and funnel and flight deck, to best effect, was one that challenged the greatest of the naval architects. They would ultimately agree the best solution required a full-length flight deck that was virtually free of any obstructions to the safety of aircraft launch and recovery operations. They had to begin with the premise that, for the sake of the most achievable safety and practicality, take-offs must be made from the forward end of the ship and landings must be made on the aft end. A major consideration, of course, was where to put the massive funnel in order to somehow minimize the visibility hazard to the approaching and landing aviators posed by the smoke of the ship’s boiler gases. Various ideas were proposed across the years of carrier development. A ducting system was considered in which the smoke discharge was carried by an array of ducting, towards the stern of the ship rather than allowing it to eminate from amidships. But the problem created by smoke from the funnel flowing across the flight deck was never adequately resolved until the coming of nuclear power for the aircraft carrier and smokeless power in the 1960s. The eventual ultimate carrier layout in the interim had the island superstructure positioned to the starboard side of the flight deck, with the navigation platform high in the structure and the funnel behind it. This was relatively efficient, if not always to the advantage of landing aviators.
Another vital design consideration was that of the transverse arrestor wire landing system, the technique for which having been tested and perfected aboard the U.S. Navy carriers Saratoga and the Lexington in 1927. It was thought that the then-high speed of these ships—thirty-four knots—would mean fulfillment of the prophecy of the early French aviator Clement Ader. In 1891, more than twelve years before that first flight of the Wright brothers, Ader had been asked by the French Minister of War to design, build and test a new two-seat aircraft to carry a light bombload for the military. He did the work, flew and crashed the craft at Satorg on 14 October 1891, losing a handsome potential contract with the government for the warplane. But Ader was nothing if not an aviation visionary with a unique and imaginative view of the future. He believed, for example, that current concepts of land warfare would be wholly transformed through the use of aerial reconnaissance, as would the warfare of fleets at sea. He originated the term porte-avions (aircraft carrier), writing that such specially-designed and developed ships would one day transport their aircraft to sea and would be unlike any other vessels, with clear and unimpeded flight decks. “An aeroplane-carrying vessel is indispensable. These vessels will be constructed on a plan very different from what is currently used. First of all the deck will be cleared of all obstacles. It will be flat, as wide as possible without jeopardizing the nautical lines of the hull, and it will look like a landing field.” He predicted that they would have elevators to take the aircraft (with their wings folded) from the flight deck to stowage below for repairs and servicing and bring them back up again, and that the carriers would operate at a high rate of speed. Ader’s predictions largely came to fruition in the 1930s, even within the restrictive climate of severe economic depression. It still proved to be a time of substantial progress in the development of carriers, their aircraft and tactics.
top The Fairey Albacore was a torpedo-reconnaissance biplane developed from the Swordfish torpedo bomber; centre: SBD dive-bomber of the carrier Lexington; above: TBD-1 Devastators of the USS Saratoga; below: HMS Ocean was commissioned in 1945 and served in the Korean War in 1951.
In those days the British government was forced by the looming threat of German post-World War One rearmament to reconsider the needs of Britain’s own armed forces. To this point the management (frequently mismanagement) of the British Fleet Air Arm had been under the control of the Air Ministry. The state of its aircraft was clearly less than state-of-the-art and the service had, since the formation of the new Royal Air Force in 1918, lost many of its best Royal Naval Air Service pilots through absorption into the RAF. By 1937, the growing inter-service rivalry led to the government reassigning responsibility for British naval aviation to the Royal Navy.
The agenda of Britain and the United States in the Washington Naval Treaty Conference of 1922 included a redefinition of the naval power of the signatories. It further included a blatant determination to minimize battleship construction and set about the imposition of rationing heavy warship construction. That determination of the principal nations was ultimately implemented, not as a result of the treaty participants adhering to the type and tonnage limitations they had imposed on themselves, but largely due to a treaty clause they had also included. They allowed themselves the option to convert any unfinished battleship hulls for completion as aircraft carriers.
The conference applied strict limits on battleship and battlecruiser tonnages for the main navies following the First World War, along with limits of both the total of aircraft carrier tonnage allowed each navy and an upper limit (27,000 tons) for each carrier. According to the rules of the conference, actual fleet units were counted, while experimental vessels were not, and the total tonnage allowed could not be exceeded. All the major navies, though, did exceed the tonnage allowances for their battleships, while all were substantially under-tonnage on their aircraft carriers, which resulted in their converting many battleships and battlecruisers then in service or under construction into aircraft carriers.
Britain’s decision to complete her unfinished battleships Rodney and Nelson, as battleships would later be seen as a mistake when they proved incapable of more than a twenty-three knot top speed when the newest aircraft carriers had top speeds in excess of thirty knots. The navies of Japan and the United States, however, opted for the carrier choice and so were able to launch their new fast carriers in the same year as Nelson and Rodney were launched. By this time, the aeroplanes being designed and coming on stream for carrier-borne operation were mostly larger, heavier, and faster, requiring ever more flight deck length for their take-offs and landings, and certainly more stowage space. The British, though, had elected to convert the Furious to a proper aircraft carrier but in doing so they mistakenly decided to combine a flush flight deck with a short bow flying-off deck, undoubtedly for both utility and economy. They repeated that error in the designs of both Glorious and Courageous, sister ships of Furious. Very soon the bow flying-off decks became obsolete, leaving the British, who had for so long paved the way in aircraft carrier design and innovation, trailing in the wake of others, especially that of the Americans.
A Boeing F3B1 carrier-based fighterbomber taking off from the flight deck of the USS Lexington in 1929.
The first full-length flat-deck carrier was HMS Argus, a British conversion completed in September 1918. She was followed a few years later by the American USS Langley, an experimental conversion which, as such, did not count under treaty terms against America’s aircraft carrier tonnage limitation.
The 1924 HMS Hermes was actually designed ahead of Japan’s carrier Hosho and her layout and features influenced the design of the Japanese vessel. Hosho was completed and commissioned before Hermes, however, her commissioning having been delayed by testing, experimentation and budgetary problems. When completed, Hermes was the first aircraft carrier to have the classic look, features, and layout of the majority of aircraft carriers to be built in future years. Her sister ship, HMS Eagle, also featured a full-length flight deck and a starboard-side island control tower. Unlike Hermes, however, Eagle was not a purpose-built carrier, but a converted battleship and her final design was less integrated than that of the Hermes. Hermes featured a new “hurricane bow”, sealed up to the flight deck, a feature also found on the new US Navy Lexington class carriers, along with substantial anti-aircraft gun batteries.
The history of the aircraft carrier actually began with balloon carriers. In July 1849 when Vulcano, a ship of the Austrian Navy, was used for the launching a several small Montgolfiere hot air balloons for the purpose of dropping bombs on Venice. Thwarted by high winds, the attempt mainly failed when most of the balloons were driven back over the ship. One of the bombs, however, did fall on the city. The next event of significance involving balloons in a military context occurred during the American Civil War, when a coal barge, the George Washington Parke Custis, was employed as a launching platform and Professor Thaddeus Lowe, Chief Aeronaut of the Union Army Balloon Corps, made reconnaissance ascents over the Potomac River in what he then proclaimed were the first successful “aerial ventures ever from a water-borne vessel”. Later, in the First World War, the use of balloons was extended with the advent of balloon carriers or tenders employed by the navies of Britain, France, Russia, Germany, Italy and Sweden. By the end of the war the tenders had mostly been converted to seaplane tenders. This then led to the development of the first ship designed to be an aircraft carrier, exemplified by the French vessel Le Canard and inspired by the first seaplane, invented in the spring of 1910. The first seaplane carrier, commissioned in December 1911, was the French La Foudre, a tender which carried her seaplanes under hangars on the main deck, from which they were lowered by crane onto the sea. She was later modified with the addition of a ten-metre flat deck for the launching of her aircraft.
In 1913, the British converted HMS Hermes into an experimental seaplane carrier, the first in the Royal Navy. She would later be converted to a cruiser, and then back again to a seaplane carrier in 1914, and in October of that year she was sunk by a German submarine. The first American seaplane tender was the USS Mississippi late in 1913.
A first in a combat role was achieved in September 1914 when, in the Battle of Tsingtao, the Wakamiya, a seaplane carrier of the Imperial Japanese Navy, mounted the world’s first successful naval-launched air raids. Four Maurice Farman seaplanes were lowered from the deck of the Wakamiyaand took off to bombard German forces, after which they returned and were hauled aboard the mother ship. And on Christmas Day, 1914, twelve seaplanes from the British cross-Channel steamers HMS Riviera, Empress, and Engadine, which had been converted into seaplane carriers, attacked the Zeppelin base at Cuxhaven and damaged a German warship, in an early demonstration of attack by ship-borne aircraft. Examples of the successful use of catapult-launched seaplanes from warships up to and through the Second World War include the float-equipped Fairey Swordfish of the battleship HMS Warspite which, in the Second Battle of Narvik in 1940, spotted for the guns of the British warships and participated in the sinking of seven German destroyers and the German submarine U-64.
As the role of the aircraft carrier evolved and developed through the 1930s, three basic types of aircraft were found to meet the primary requirements of the major navies: torpedo bombers which were also employed in conventional bombing and reconnaissance roles; dive-bombers, which also doubled in the reconnaissance task; and fighters for bomber escort and fleet defence. The space limitations of the carriers meant that the designs of all these aircraft, were relatively small overall size, with single-engine power, and folding wings. A further development of the period was the armoured flight deck, effectively protecting the hangar deck below.
In the mid-1930s, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt proposed the conversion of a number of Cleveland class cruisers whose keels and hulls were already laid down, to be what would become known as escort carriers or CVLs in the U.S. Navy. They were to be light and small, which were to be utilitarian but not particularly fast and not intended to keep up with the fast fleet carriers like Lexington and Saratoga. One example of the Royal Navy’s version of such a vessel was HMS Hermes of 1959, a vessel which would serve in 1982 as the flagship of British forces in the Falklands War. As of 2013, Hermes was still serving … in the Indian Navy as INS Viraat.
As the Second World War began, Britain desperately needed the food, fuel, weapons, ammunition, supplies and other aid that could only be provided by Atlantic merchant shipping convoys from North America. To help protect these convoys, the British designed and developed Merchant Aircraft Carriers, vessels that had flat decks and accommodated six aircraft. A maintenance capability for the aircraft was limited and there was no hangar facility, but these interim vessels served as some protection until the arrival of the CVEs, dedicated escort aircraft carriers built in the United States. The CVEs were only about one-third the size of the fast fleet carriers and operated a small air wing of about twenty to thirty anti-submarine aircraft. They came to be through the use of two basic hull designs: one from a merchant ship, the other from a tanker, the latter being a bit larger and faster. In addition to their duties in the defence of the convoys, the CVEs were heavily employed in transporting military aircraft to various war theaters. Some also took part in campaigns such as the Battle of Samar in the liberation of the Philippines, where six of the escort carriers and their own destroyer escorts attacked five Japanese battleships, forcing them to retreat.
Another interesting British idea put into use in the interim between the period of the Merchant Aircraft Carriers and the escort carriers was the CAM ship or Catapult Aircraft Merchantman. This was a merchant vessel equipped with a catapult and a war-weary Hawker Hurricane fighter from which it was launched for convoy protection duties. With its mission completed, the Hurricane could not land back aboard the CAM ship and, unless it was within range of land would have to ditch in the sea. The CAM ships and aircraft operated for more than two years and relatively few launches were made in all that time, but their record included the downing of six enemy bombers for the loss of just one British pilot.
Women in naval aviation at NAS Pensacola in 1918.
U.S.Navy float planes lined up at NAS Pensacola in the early 1930s.
One of the handful of RAF pilots who flew the dangerous and demanding “Hurricat” missions, as the aircraft were known, was Dicky Turley-George, a Hurricane pilot who was stationed at RAF Tang-mere on the Sussex coast in the Battle of Britain. At Tangmere, Dicky met Ann, who would become his wife. Ann: “I was Hitler’s secret weapon. I was a cook and served in the Officer’s Mess.” Dicky survived the Battle of Britain and volunteered to serve with the Merchant Ships Fighter Unit which was based at Speke Airfield, near Liverpool. With high revs and rocket-boosted power, he was launched from the merchant vessels, and usually finished up in the sea. He was involved in the downing of German Condor multi-engined maritime aircraft: “Being launched was easy. You were strapped in tightly, kept your elbows tucked into your hips, then, as the ship breasted a wave you pressed the fire button and, with quite a lot of power on, you climbed away.”
The aircraft carrier really came into its own in the Second World War, taking on a substantial part of the action in the major theaters and campaigns. It was then that she inherited the mantle of capital ship of the great navies by virtue of her mobility and the enormous and highly effective strength of her air wing. The battleship had done impressive service throughout most of the two previous centuries, but the ability of the aircraft carrier to project national power, to reach and strike the enemy anywhere guaranteed her succession and leadership role in naval warfare. With the advent of the nuclear-powered supercarrier in the 1960s, and her accompanying battle and strike group of escorting warships and submarines, that leadership role was clearly established for the foreseeable future.
In the early part of the Second World War, however, aircraft carriers sometimes went into battle with a greater vulnerability than that of their predescessors, the traditional battleships. While the navies of Germany and Italy in that time possessed no carriers of their own, they more than held their own in situations where enemy carriers were forced into gun-range encounters. The first example of an aircraft carrier to be lost in the war was that of HMS Courageous, originally built as a cruiser but rebuilt as a carrier, which was sunk by the German submarine U-29 on 17 September 1939. That was followed in the Norwegian campaign of 1940 when HMS Glorious was sunk by the German battle-cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, 8 June 1940.
The carrier soon established her strength and versatility though, when in November 1940, the Royal Navy’s HMS Illustrious launched a long-range raid by twenty-one Swordfish torpedo bombers on warships of the Italian fleet in the harbour at Taranto, the first such strike to be so effectively planned and successfully executed. Lieutenant Commander John Wellham, Fleet Air Arm, flew one of the Swordfish aircraft [called Stringbag by some] in that raid: “I was serving in HMS Eagle, a very old carrier which had been in the fleet for some years. We came to the Mediterranean at a time when it was obvious that Mussolini was going to come into the war on the side of the Germans. He’d been sitting on the sidelines, waiting to see which side was likely to produce the most glory for him. As the Germans were sweeping through Europe, it was clearly going to be their side that he wanted to join. We, therefore, were sent to join the Mediterranean fleet, which we did but a few weeks before Mussolini came into the war.
“Led by Sir Andrew Cunningham, a wildly enthusiastic chap, we tore around the Med looking for someone with whom to be hostile, and actually only found the Italian fleet at sea once. We attacked them twice in four hours with our Swordfish torpedo bombers. Unfortunately, there were only nine of us making the attacks, quite inadequate against a fast-moving fleet. So it was necessary for us to catch them in harbour. Our admiral did his homework and found that attacking enemy ships in harbour had been quite successful right back to 300 bc.
“The RAF had a squadron of Bristol Blenheims in the area, which they were using for reconnaissance of the various North African harbours, including Bomba. One day they told us about a submarine depot ship at Bomba with a submarine alongside it. They did a recce for us the next morning and discovered another submarine coming into the harbour, so the three of us went off in our Swordfish and, at Bomba, spotted the large submarine on the surface, obviously recharging its batteries. Our leader put his torpedo into it and the sub blew up and sank very satisfactorily. The other chap and I went on and as we got closer we found that, not only was there a depot ship and a submarine, there was a destroyer between the two of them. I let my torpedo go towards the depot ship. My colleague dropped his from the other side and it went underneath the submarine and hit the destroyer. I was very excited and was shouting. Things were going up in the air and we discovered that all four ships had sunk, which was confirmed later by aerial reconnaissance. That night the Italians admitted on the radio that they had lost four ships in the harbour. However, they said that the loss was due to an overwhelming force of motor torpedo boats and torpedo bombers which had attacked them during the night. If I had been commanding officer of that base, I would have reported something along those same lines. I certainly wouldn’t have been prepared to admit that three elderly biplanes had sunk four of my ships.
above: A Fairey Swordfish is readied for flight aboard an escort carrier of the Royal Navy in the Second World War; below: The Italian battleship Conti de Cavour the day after the Royal Navy attack on the Italian fleet at Taranto, November 1940.
“The attack on the ships in harbour at Bomba had confirmed for us, and for Cunningham, that the best way to attack ships was when they were in harbour. He then decided that an attack on the main Italian fleet in their base at Taranto was imperative. That was all very well, but we in Eaglehad a limited number of aircraft and no long-range fuel tanks to get us there and back. We also needed absolutely up-to-date reconnaissance to do an attack like that. Then the new carrier Illustrious came to join us, bringing us the long-range tanks we needed. The Royal Air Force provided a flight of three Martin Maryland bombers for the reconnaissance work, and they were very good for that. They had the speed, the training and the ability, and each day at dawn and dusk they gave us reports on the positions of ships in Taranto. We couldn’t have done the job without them. “The go-ahead was given for the raid because both Illustrious and Eagle were fully prepared to do it—but then complications arose. Illustrious had a fire in the hangar deck which caused a delay. Meanwhile, Eagle, which had been bombed repeatedly by the aircraft of the Reggia Aeronautica, had developed plumbing problems. When we tried to fuel our aircraft we weren’t quite sure what we were fueling them with, and so Eagle was scrubbed from the operation. We went on with the plan, however, and transferred five aircraft and eight crews over to Illustrious.
“The attack was called Operation Judgement and it was set for 11 November 1940. Diversionary actions involving merchant navy convoys elsewhere in the Med were organized and worked well, disguising the fact that we were going to hit Taranto.
“We went off in two waves, some of us with bombs, some with torpedoes. The Martin recce flights had shown us that the Italian battleships were in the Mar Grande, the largest part of Taranto harbour, while destroyers, cruisers, submarines and various auxiliary vessels were in the inner harbour, Mar Piccolo.
“At Taranto, I had to dodge a barrage balloon and in doing so I was hit by flak which broke the aileron control spar, and I couldn’t move the control column, which is very embarrassing in the middle of a dive. So, using brute force and ignorance, I cleared the column enough to get it fully over to the right. While this was going on and I was trying to get the thing to fly properly, I suddenly appreciated that I was diving right into the middle of Taranto City, which was obviously not a good thing. So I hauled the plane out of the dive, found the target and attacked it. But when you drop 2,000 pounds off an aircraft of that weight, it rises. There is nothing you can do about it, and it rose into the flak from the battleship I was attacking. I was hit again and got a hole about a metre long by at least a half-metre wide. The Swordfish still flew and we got back 200 miles over the sea with the aircraft in that condition. It was very painful because, to fly straight, I had to keep left rudder on all the time, which is bad for your ankle, but we got home.”
When the British Fleet Air Arm attacked the warships of the Italian fleet in Taranto harbour on 11/12 November 1940, John Wellham, centre, piloted one of the Swordfish biplanes in the raid; top: The crew of another of the Fairey torpedo bombers with their aircraft. The successful attack later had a powerful influence on the Japanese admirals who planned the surprise attack on American battleships and port facilities in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on 7 December 1941; above: John Wellham aboard HMS Illustrious in 1999.
Commander Charles Lamb, RN, from his book War in a Stringbag: “When a carrier turns into wind to receive her aircraft, it seems to be lazy, leisurely movement to the approaching pilot, about to land. The bow starts to turn, imperceptibly to begin with, and then more emphatically in a graceful sweeping arc. The stern seems to kick the other way, as though resisting the motion, and then gives way in a rush, causing a mighty wash astern. While the ship is turning, the wind across the flight-deck can be violently antagonistic to a pilot who tries to land before the turn has been completed. Since we were about to run out of petrol, the turn seemed interminable, and after one-half circuit of the ship I decided to risk the cross-wind, and the violent turning motion and get down before it was too late.”
Bill Sarra and his observer, Jack Bowker, were flying in the diversionary bombing element of the first strike of Swordfish on the harbour at Taranto. They had been briefed to drop their bombs on the cruisers, destroyers, or oil storage tanks in the inner harbour, the Mar Piccolo. Sarra was unable to discern the specified targets and crossed over the dockyard. It was then that he spotted the hangars of the Italian seaplane base just ahead. He released his bombs from an altitude of 500 feet and watched as one made a direct hit on a hangar, with the others blasting the slipways. The anti-aircraft fire was intense, but Sarra and Bowker returned safely to the carrier Illustrious. The Royal Navy victory at Taranto that night meant that the balance of capital ship power in the Mediterranean had been shifted in favour of the Allies. The first awards made to participants in the Taranto strike were few indeed. Six months later in a supplementary list, Sarra and Bowker were ‘mentioned in despatches’, but by then they were both prisoners of war.
“You were throwing the aircraft about like a madman, half the time, and every time I tried to look over the side, the slipstream nearly ripped off my goggles! The harbour was blanked out by ack-ack and I had to check with the compass to see which way we were facing!”—from War in a Stringbag by Charles Lamb, RN
When the United States entered the Second World War she had only three aircraft carriers operating in the Pacific, and only seven carriers in total. Japan began the war with the largest, most modern carrier fleet in the world, ten great warships. She would lose nine of them in the conflict. Influenced heavily by the success of the British raid on the Italian fleet at Taranto late in 1940, the Japanese prepared to attack American battleships and installations in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Their attack would come on 7 December 1941 and would involve the use of specially modified aerial torpedoes for use in shallow water. The attack would profoundly demonstrate the powerful capability of a large force of modern aircraft carriers. No such carrier force had ever been unleashed against another nation in naval history.
The army, naval and air forces of Japan then began a seemingly relentless campaign across the western Pacific and throughout Southeast Asia. North of Singapore, off the east coast of Malaya, they attacked and sank the British battleship Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser Repulse, with land-based bombers and torpedo bombers of the Imperial Japanese Navy. It was history’s first example of aircraft sinking a battleship which was fighting and manoeuvring at sea.
In April 1942, in reprisal for the Japanese surprise attack on the United States at Pearl Harbor, a bombing raid by sixteen U.S. Army Air Corps B-25 Mitchell bombers was staged and led by Lt Col. Jimmy Doolittle. The bombers were transported aboard the carrier USS Hornet (CV-8) to a point from which they were launched to fly the attack on targets in Tokyo, a relatively token strike, but one that shocked the Japanese people who had been led to believe that they were quite safe from enemy attack on their home islands.
More significant carrier actions would follow, including the historic Battle of Midway, probably the most important battle of the Pacific campaign in the war. It took place between 4 and 7 June 1942, six months after the Pearl Harbor attack. In it the carrier-based aircraft of the U.S. Navy stunningly and decisively defeated the Imperial Japanese Navy, sinking four of the six IJN carriers present, a blow from which the Japanese would not recover … the worst Japanese naval defeat in 350 years. In the Midway action, the Japanese Navy had planned to lure the American carriers into a trap as a part of their intention to occupy Midway Island in a response to the Doolittle raid on Tokyo. But the Americans had been forewarned of the Japanese plan when U.S. codebreakers learned the date, location and details of the enemy plan, enabling the American Navy to plan an ambush of its own.
Following the Midway operation, the U.S. island-hopping campaign in the western Pacific, its attrition, and the gathering strength of America’s military industrial output, coupled with Japan’s inability to keep pace in replacing her losses in ships and pilots, dictated her decline in the conflict. Her once-powerful carrier-led striking force would never again threaten the Allies in the Pacific Theater of Operations.
below: A woman war worker at the Grumman aircraft plant in 1943.
